You Can Cross Any Time You Want

You Can Cross Any Time You Want ©2010 by David Spener1 Beto was a coyote who had been deported from the United States after being arrested while driving a van full of migrants near Alpine, Texas, just north of Big Bend National Park. He had lived and worked for five years in Austin, Texas in the late 1990s before his arrest. When I met him in 2002, Beto was living back home in the small town of La Cancha, Nuevo León, working as a recruiter of customers for a group of coyotes based at the border in Piedras Negras, Coahuila. In our interviews he told me how he came to be a coyote, how the groups he had worked with operated, how the business of moving migrants across the border had changed in recent years, and how he viewed his future as a coyote. I wound up in the small town of La Cancha, Nuevo León in 2002 by traveling there with the father of a Mexican American woman I knew in San Antonio, Texas. She was from the McAllen area in South Texas and her father, Rigoberto, had grown up in La Cancha before moving to the United States as an adult.2 I had told her about my interest in hearing migrants’ border‐crossing stories and she directed me to her father, who offered to go with me to La Cancha to introduce me to his friends and family there, who could tell me more about the town’s experience with sending its residents to live and work in the United States. La Cancha is a small town of about 2,000 people located a few dozen miles outside the Monterrey metropolitan area. Agriculture, ranching and small‐scale commerce are its main economic activities and many of its residents have migrated either to Monterrey or Texas, whether for temporary sojourns or to live and work permanently, as Rigoberto had done. One of Rigoberto’s brothers ran a small, open‐air store along one of the main highways leading away from Monterrey, where he sold canned goods, beer, and a limited variety of other foods and dry goods. The empty lot behind the store was a place where a few dozen semi‐ or intermittently employed men from La Cancha and other small communities would gather in the afternoon to socialize while drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and occasionally making roast‐kid tacos over an open fire, as they did in honor of one of my several visits. I first met Beto, a former migrant and occasional coyote, around this fire. I 2 YOU CAN CROSS ANY TIME YOU WANT interviewed him a few days later and then again on a subsequent visit to the store. Beto was 24 years old and lived with his wife and her parents. He had recently married her and she was pregnant with their first child. Beto had been born and raised in La Cancha and had never lived anywhere else in Mexico. He attended school through the second year of secundaria (equivalent to the eighth grade in the U.S. system) before dropping out and going to work. He first went to the United States to try to earn some money when he was about 15 years old. This was in the early 1990s. He went back and forth several times with a friend who was a couple of years older than he was. The friend was a small‐time coyote who took local people to Texas, a few at a time. Beto acted as his helper and as a consequence did not have to pay his friend the fee he charged his customers. Beto went back and forth with his coyote friend a half a dozen times or so over the course of a couple of years and learned the route well. Afterwards, he himself took people across on his own for a year or so. In his late teens, Beto crossed the border clandestinely and went to Austin, Texas, where he lived for about five years. He worked construction there during the week and fell in with a band of coyotes that brought migrants across the border through Big Bend National Park. He made a lot of money, had several girlfriends with whom he had three children, and eventually got arrested driving a van full of migrants through Alpine, Texas. Beto spent six months in a federal prison in Pecos, Texas before being deported back to Mexico. Map 1. Boquillas crossing route used by Beto & collaborators, 19992000 YOU CAN CROSS ANY TIME YOU WANT 3 Beto had been back in La Cancha for about two years when I met him. People who knew him told me they thought he might also have been involved in drug‐dealing in Austin, but no one knew for sure. He had worked as a welder at a Pemex refinery near Cadereyta, Nuevo León for a while, but he had working there by the time I met him. Though he no longer traveled to the United States, he recruited customers for a group of coyotes based at the border in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, who paid him $100 for every migrant he brought them. Beto had an old Chevrolet sedan parked behind the store and some of the other young men that hung out there would go into the car with him from time to time. I wasn’t sure if they were getting high together, if Beto was their local seller of marijuana, or both—or neither. No one discussed it and I didn’t want to press the issue. One of Beto’s friends told me, in an affectionate tone, that Beto was a bandido and very mañoso [crafty, tricky]. No one seemed to regard him as any kind of real criminal, though, and his relations with everyone coming in and out of the store appeared to be cordial and tranquilo. He was not an overtly fearsome or threatening character in any way, more of a handsome Johnny that a protective father might be worried about taking advantage of his teen‐aged daughter. He was happy to talk with me about his experiences. TEENAGED COYOTES OUT FOR AN ADVENTURE Beto’s teen‐aged coyote friend used a simple method to get people across the border and beyond. They would swim across the river near Matamoros, Tamaulipas and then walk to the rail yards in Harlingen, Texas. There they would hop a freight train to Houston. After having made the trip with his friend a number of times, Beto began to take two or three people across himself every few weeks. His customers were all young men from La Cancha and the surrounding ranchos. He charged them U.S. $450 to be taken to Houston: Beto: My friend taught me the way. Back then it was really easy to cross. You almost never had any trouble getting people through. It cost them $450. Spener: What was included in that “package”? Beto: Nothing was included except the train and the hike to the train! [Laughs]. That was it! And they had to pay all the expenses and food on the way. Bus tickets. Food. Hotel. Everything you needed to pay for. Spener: So, they had to cover all the trip’s expenses, including yours. 4 YOU CAN CROSS ANY TIME YOU WANT Beto: Exactly. After swimming across the river, Beto would walk with his customers to a store in Los Indios, Texas. From there they would call a taxi driver who would charge them ten dollars per person to drive them to Harlingen: We met this person originally just by calling the taxi company’s number they gave us at the store and he was the one they sent to get us. And afterwards we reached an agreement and he said, “Okay, call me whenever you need me.” He gave us his number. Then we’d just call him and he would come for us. Nobody else, just him, because other drivers, if you called them, might turn you into immigration. Having the taxi driver to rely upon was a great boon to them, since it eliminated having to walk long distances through the brush and across farm fields in South Texas, which could be very tough, especially in the hot summer months. Beto contrasted the conditions he had encountered in South Texas with what he had heard about the Arizona desert: Around here where we work it’s a lot different. A lot of people cross out there in the desert and they die, for lack of water, of thirst, for lack of food, or whatever. And those people do have problems. Out there in the Arizona desert. But not around here. It’s very rare for this to happen here. … Here you walk through cotton fields and then you walk along the railroad tracks. And you just keep walking like that, drinking water, going up to ranch houses to ask for water, asking for food. We didn’t have to do that so much since we took a taxi and all, but a lot of people do, out on the edge of town, asking for help along the way. If there were a lot of U.S. immigration agents patrolling the region and checking the trains, Beto and his customers would hop [or get chased] off and hole up in motels in the Kingsville area. Beto did not charge his customers until they got to Houston, although, as noted above, they had to cover all the expenses along the way: Well, a lot of people used to charge here before they left.

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